22 January 2016

What is a Subscriber?

See the little chicklet with the red heart? I use the Google FeedBurner tool to burn feeds for my various blogs. There are several ways to get people to subscribe to your blog feed. This little chicklet is just one of them.

I'm okay with the chicklet and I really really love the Feedburner. But I noticed something interesting about "My Feeds" almost right from the very start. The Subscriber count.

Yeah. (???) The number looks ... questionable? ... unreasonable? ... mysterious?

I'm going to settle on the word "squirrelly". Even though my spellchecker indicates that it's not a word.

The numbers don't make sense! So I'm thinking, they must be some sort of secret code and I've always had my theory about Rocky and Bullwinkle. So that's why I decided "squirrelly" was the best way to describe my subscriber count.

Anyway I found the answer to my puzzle, as to why the numbers look unreal.

This is the Google Support Team's explanation to: What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?

I am so glad that I read the response, because it clarifies everything!!

Love the Feedburner tool. It is a valuable helpful tool and I will continue to use it until Google tells me it's no longer free or for whatever reason or for no reason at all, I just won't be allowed to use it. It's theirs. They own it. They can tell me to take a hike!

But I don't think I'm going to rely on the number of subscribers who supposedly hold their breath and wake up each morning checking their eMail messages or waiting to receive notifications that I've published another blog post!!

WHY? Because based on the response I read.